Do Gamers Care About High Framerates?

Gore impresario Hershell Gordon Lewis summed up an important rule of film-making when he pointed out that "People have walked out of movies after looking at 10 seconds of them, saying,'This is pretty doggone dull,'... [but] no one has ever walked out of a movie because of a ragged pan." But does the same axiom apply in video games? Specifically, has anyone ever stopped playing a game because the frame-rate is too low?

According to Insomniacs Mike Acton, No, they haven't. "There is virtually no advantage in sales or reviews of a 60 fps game versus a 30 fps game," reads a blog post from Acton. More boldly, Acton states:

This assertion is backed up with impressive charts and graphs that seem to indicate gamers and reviewers don't actually care about high frame-rates, so long as a game performs solidly. According to Acton, framerate drops are seen by some players as a "reward for creating or forcing a complex setup in which a lot of things must happen on the screen at once. As in, 'Damn! Did you see that? That was crazy!'"